15 October 2007

in a scathing article captioned 'house speaker pelosi lashes out at antiwar protesters' (see link) the world socialist web site takes the lying, democratic, piss-poor excuse for a house speaker nancy pelosi to task.

excerpt:

Asked about criticism of the failure (or more accurately, refusal) of the congressional Democratic majority to take action to put an end to the war in Iraq, despite the overwhelming antiwar opinion among Democratic voters, Pelosi said, “I am well aware of the unhappiness of the base.”

She told reporters that antiwar demonstrators had established seemingly permanent protest encampments outside her home in San Francisco several months, and more recently outside her Washington home as well.

The real venom in Pelosi’s comments was reported by Washington Post Capitol Hill columnist Dana Milbank, one of those in attendance at the press interview. While Pelosi invariably maintains a publicly smiling posture, he wrote, “her spirits soured instantly when somebody asked about the anger of the Democratic ‘base’ over her failure to end the war in Iraq.”

“Look,” she said, “I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things—Buddhas? I don’t know what they were—couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk.”

Pelosi continued: “If they were poor and they were sleeping on my sidewalk, they would be arrested for loitering, but because they have ‘Impeach Bush’ across their chest, it’s the First Amendment.”

Pelosi is married to a multimillionaire investor, and her comments were charged with social resentment as well as political hostility. The antiwar protesters are not only unwelcome because they expose her hypocritical pretense to opposing the Iraq bloodbath—they are dirty, ragged and disreputable, and irritate the neighbors.

Pelosi’s remark—imagine that riffraff “sleeping on my sidewalk”—is reveals the enormous social distance between the masses of working people, housewives, students who oppose the war, and the privileged ruling elite. And her disparaging reference to the First Amendment demonstrates the hostility of a big business politician towards the democratic rights of the working class.